of Delhi. From 2003 to 2005, Dev Sen was the J. P. Naik Distinguished Fellow at the Centre of Women's Development Studies in New Delhi. She represented herself and India in many international conferences, both academic and literary, and at the Festival of India USA in 1986. Associations She held executive positions in the International Comparative Literature Association (1973–1979), and the International Association of Semiotic and Structural Studies (1989–1994). Dev Sen was the Vice-President of the Bangiya Sahitya Parishad, an academy for Bengali literature. She was the founder and president of West Bengal Women Writers' Association. She was the founder secretary and later Vice-President of the Indian National Comparative Literature Association. She was a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain. She was a member of the Advisory Board for Bengali, Sahitya Akademi from 1978 to 1982, as well as the Member and Convenor, Bharatiya Jnanpith Award Language Advisory Committee from 1975 to 1990. She also served as Member of the Jury of important literary awards including the Jnanpith Award, Saraswati Samman, Kabir Samman, and Rabindra Puraskar. Literary career Dev Sen published more than 80 books in Bengali: poetry, novels, short stories, plays, literary criticism, personal essays, travelogues, humour writing, translations and children's literature. She worked with the treatment of women in world epics; she wrote several short stories presenting Sita in a different way from how she appears in the Ramayana. Her first collection of poems Pratham Pratyay (First Confidence) was published in 1959. Her second poetry collection Swagato Debdoot was published 12 years later. Her first novel Ami Anupam (I, Anupam) was published in 1976 in the Puja Issue of the Ananda Bazar Patrika. It is about urban middle class intellectuals who lead the youth in revolution and later contradict them during the Naxalite movement. Dev Sen dealt with a wide variety of social, political, psychological problems like the role of the intellectuals in the Naxalite movement (Ami Anupam, 1976), the identity crisis of Indian writing in English (1977), that of second generation non-resident Indians (1985), breakdown of the joint family, life in old age homes (1988), homosexuality (1995), facing AIDS (1999, 2002), child abuse, obsession, and uprootedness. Her first short story collection was Monsieur Hulor Holiday (Monsieur Hulo's Holiday, 1980). Her essays, such as Nati Nabanita (Nabaneeta the Actress, 1983), are considered the best of her prose writing by critic Sanjukta Gupta. Her best-selling Karuna